That's right, we have taken the plunge and are making dog food for Titan. We have been thinking about this for quite a few months but after experiencing several bouts of diarrhea with Titan while in FL, we decided we would give it a try when we got home.
Wendy and Dan have been making their own dog food for a few years and have it down to a science, using a recipe from their vet. We badgered politely asked them to give us the ingredients and proportions so we could get started.
10 pounds of ground turkey, purchased in a frozen roll from our butcher.
Since we didn't have a pan large enough, we cut it into several pieces and baked it. Then we Bill mashed it up. Since the meat loses some weight as it cooks, we used the fat that cooked off.
We added 2 1/2 pounds of carrots, shredded.
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| What a great color! |
We cooked 13 cups of short grain brown rice in 30 cups of water, which netted about 20 pounds of cooked rice, then added the carrots.
Maybe this doesn't look like much, but it's in a 28 quart pot and once we added the turkey, the pot was 3/4 full and weighed more than 30 pounds!
We stirred and stirred and stirred, until the whole big mess was cool. We haven't been able to find any appropriate plastic containers yet, so we measured it out on a postal scale (12 oz. each) and used storage bags.
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| 20 days of homemade dog food |
Many recipes call for a calcium supplement and suggest bone meal powder, suitable for animal consumption. For whatever reason, bone meal powder is impossible to find. We settled for Animal Essentials Natural Seaweed Calcium.
It contains calcium and seven other minerals, which I felt was a reasonable number of ingredients, unlike a couple of supplements I researched that had more than a dozen, some of which I couldn't pronounce. I ordered it from Amazon but it's available directly from
Animal Essentials. We'll add the appropriate amount to each meal once it's received, then add enough to the entire batch next time.
We also add one fish oil pill per day, which we have been doing since we brought Titan home.
We put 40 bags in the freezer and kept two days worth of food in the fridge. We'll bring up another four bags when these are gone. Not only is Titan licking his bowl clean twice a day, he's going back and looking for more ;o) Yay!
AND...No.More.Diarrhea, unless you count last night after he helped himself to the dry cat food. Bad Dog!
Kudos to Wendy & Dan for sharing the good results of their trials and tribulations with us.
Thanks for stopping by...
;o)
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